Women's LinkedIn Profiles Are Clicked on Less Often Than Men's, Report Finds

LinkedIn now has over half a billion members, which translates to an unprecedented amount of data on the hiring and job hunting process. For its latest report, LinkedIn looked at how gender effects users' job prospects and found that recruiters are more likely to look at a man's profile than a woman's, Fast Company reports.

LinkedIn's Gender Insights Report [PDF] analyzed data from 610 million LinkedIn members in 200 countries in 2018 as well as surveys conducted in 2017 and 2018. It found that job recruiters using the professional networking site click on a man's profile over a woman's 13 percent of the time, indicating unconscious bias in the recruiting process.

But this bias appears to be less of a problem if they actually make it to a woman's page. According to the same report, recruiters were just 3 percent less likely to message a woman than a man after viewing her profile. LinkedIn says it's working on combating the initial selection bias by giving recruiters the option to disable candidate profile pictures while searching.

The statistics on hiring look much brighter for women. Female candidates are 16 more likely than men to get hired after applying for a job and 18 percent more likely than men to get hired after applying for senior roles. As the report says, this is likely explained by the fact that women are much more selective in the application process and tend to only go after jobs they feel 100 percent qualified for. Women are 16 percent less likely than men to apply for a job after viewing it and they apply to 20 percent fewer jobs overall.

LinkedIn also found that women prioritize knowing the salary and benefits of the jobs they're applying for more than men do. Woman are still paid less than men across nearly all major occupations in the U.S., and a lack of pay transparency can reinforce that gap. Here are some ways to find out how much your coworkers are making at the job you already have.